A provocative point surfaced in Tuesday’s episode 46 with Matt Mooney of MTB.Fitness—namely, that negative motivations can be used for positive outcomes. This idea has been working me since that conversation, so much so that it felt worthy of additional exploration, here.
On this one, I find myself split between two realities—the one I read about, and the one I live.
The one I read about, in this instance, tends to tell me that positive motivators are (and I’m quite oversimplifying here) better than negative motivators. The carrots in the matter of Carrots v. Sticks, these are the motivators shown empirically to help build positive self-esteem, lasting discipline, well being, flow states, and even altruism.
Yet my experience tells me that negative motivators are, sometimes, also my friends. What’s brown and sticky and gets me out of spiraling bad habits sometimes? You guessed it.
Matt Mooney’s insights illuminated this reality for me—I don’t think I was even aware of the extent to which this is true for me until he brought it up.
So… which is it? What does the data/research say about negative motivations? Can and/or should they ever be leveraged to create positive change?
Don’t follow Kubrick.
Perhaps the core concept at the root of this question is the notion of aversives, which are basically anything we want to move away from. As Wikipedia has it:
“In psychology, aversives are unpleasant stimuli that induce changes in behavior via negative reinforcement or positive punishment…Aversives can vary from being slightly unpleasant or irritating to physically, psychologically, and/or emotionally damaging.”
It’s not news that aversives make up a substantial portion of the human experience and that they vary greatly from person to person. They also drive several of our inherent cognitive biases—think loss aversion, regret aversion, and I would also argue that biases that resist change, like belief perseverance, fit into this category.
However, acknowledging that aversives exist seems quite a different thing than consciously using aversives to promote change or provoke a desired behavior. And willfully recruiting aversives, especially if someone else does it for us, can be tricky at best.
Behavior-change methods that use aversion have a controversial history and are often viewed as ethically questionable. A notorious example of this can be found in the extreme Ludovico Technique used in A Clockwork Orange to cure the villain protagonist of, basically, sadism. If you haven’t seen the movie, the short of it is that Malcolm McDowell’s character was strapped to a chair and forced to watch violent videos, under the influence of a mind-controlling drug, in an attempt to create an aversion to violence.
The whole thing was very… Kubrick.
My problem with this technique (beyond the sinister moral dubiousness) is that the mechanism doesn’t seem right—it basically conflates repetition and aversion, which isn’t quite how the brain works. In fact, it often works the opposite way—repetition builds pathways in the mind that make the action easier and more efficient over time.
And this technique also uses mind-controlling drugs, so there’s that.
But while the Kubrick method of using aversion misses the landing, an example of a real-world technique comes from the (admittedly pseudoscientific) neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) school of thought. This technique utilizes how our brain processes space in order to create aversions—usually to smoking or cravings of some kind—that lead to new positive habits. In a hypnotic state, one is guided to “locate” an aversion they already have, describe the aversion and its “location,” feel it completely, then file a new desired aversion alongside it a way akin to the maxim, “Neurons that fire together wire together.” Basically, you couple the new aversion with the old one to create a new subconscious association.
Pseudoscience or not, I have actually had some personal success with this technique, and to me it seems closer to an effective mechanism for creating change.
Love your suffering?
Then, as if my Spotify algorithm became sentient, heard episode 46, then served up some other concepts to help me chew on this, I listened to a few other podcast conversations this week that revealed additional nuance.
In a recent episode of Hidden Brain on the science of cravings, psychiatrist Judson Brewer described a technique for battling cravings that requires one to lean fully into them. So, instead of trying to push away the craving, you embrace it with total attention and awareness. I have also heard of a similar technique used by yogis and meditators, as this YouTuber poignantly explains.
But Brewer touched on something that seems pertinent to this conversation when he noted that when smokers leaned into the full experience of smoking, many actually discovered a hidden aversion they had to cigarettes. They didn’t actually like the taste or feel of smoking! It was just that the addicted craving feeling was so strong that it kept them simply seeking relief. Fully dropping into their experience of smoking helped them discover this deeper distaste for it, and thus helped them quit one of the most addictive substances out there!
In another podcast episode the algorithm served me this week (it wasn’t recent—see previous comment about the algorithm becoming sentient), Arthur Brooks spoke to Dan Harris about the idea of sacred suffering. His argument was that we need suffering and discomfort to create the contrast that helps us better experience positive states and to push us toward the things that actually create the conditions for lasting “happiness.”
“Love your suffering,” he said.
How does that relate to aversion? We experience suffering with aversion, and this aversion can create movement toward something better. When loud enough, it can also break us out of unhealthy conditioning.
Yet, in order for aversion to be utilized for positive change, a behavior has to become associated with a negative experience. Some of this happens naturally—we feel the craving sensation, for example, and we automatically reach for the thing we’re craving in order to alleviate it. However, if we follow Brewer’s advice and press into the situation a little more fully, we often can reveal a deeper underlying aversion that may actually conflict with the automatic one. I spoke about this part on the podcast—I often find that the way I feel when I’m out of shape, for example, becomes the aversion I deliberately recruit when I’m looking to avoid the behaviors that made me out of shape in the first place.
So basically, my deeper aversion trumps my surface-level aversion and helps me turn the ship around.
But, I want to be clear that while aversion can sometimes help me turn the ship around, the data shows just how much we really shouldn’t stay there. Taken too far, this kind of moving away energy, or “no” energy as I’ve called it on the podcast, can lead to many issues when taken on, long-term. Our brain’s negativity bias can easily pave the way to negative self talk and thinking habits, and those have been shown time and again to increase experiences of things like stress, fear, anxiety, and depression while also reducing our abilities to deal with those experiences. Those habits also don’t perform well for long-term motivation—the more intrinsically motivated we are, and the more we do things for joyfully and for their own sake, the more likely we are to stick with a particular behavior.
Aversion can be a tool, not a way.
My grand takeaway is this: Aversion can be a temporary tool to avoid old behaviors and adopt new ones, but it should not be a way of being.
If you think about the experience of moving your hand away from a hot stove, it’s instant and temporary. Hopefully, you don’t spend your life thinking about how much you hate hot stoves, and even more hopefully, you don’t create an identity out of it: (S)he who avoids hot stoves. The latter two cases demonstrate the powerful effect that aversives can have when they shack up with fear, which can turn into a full-blown avoidance strategy if you’re not careful.
For me, focusing on aversives is a temporary move I use at the point of change (and slightly thereafter) to help move away from danger or ill health and rejoin the deeper flow of life.
But, I’m just a volleyball player on a bike, thinking through the lens of my own experiences and perspectives. And since confirmation bias is corrected in the collective, tell me (and each other)… what do you think?